Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18607

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Magazine

Elliott C
Making a Killing
Mother Jones 2010 Sep
http://motherjones.com/toc/2010/09

Notes:

CAFE study is published as:
Efficacy and Tolerability of Olanzapine, Quetiapine, and Risperidone in the Treatment of Early Psychosis: A Randomized,
Double-Blind 52-Week Comparison
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/164/7/1050
(free full text)

Full text:

It’s not easy to work up a good feeling about the institution that destroyed your life, which may be why Mary Weiss
initially seemed a little reluctant to meet me. “You can understand my hesitation to look other than with suspicion at
anyone associated with the University of Minnesota,” Mary wrote to me in an email. In 2003, Mary’s 26-year-old son, Dan,
was enrolled against her wishes in a psychiatric drug study at the University of Minnesota, where I teach medical
ethics. Less than six months later, Dan was dead. I’d learned about his death from a deeply unsettling newspaper series
by St. Paul Pioneer Press reporters Jeremy Olson and Paul Tosto that suggested he was coerced into a
pharmaceutical-industry study from which the university stood to profit, but which provided him with inadequate care.
Over the next few months, I talked to several university colleagues and administrators, trying to learn what had
happened. Many of them dismissed the story as slanted and incomplete. Yet the more I examined the medical and court
records, the more I became convinced that the problem was worse than the Pioneer Press had reported. The danger lies not
just in the particular circumstances that led to Dan’s death, but in a system of clinical research that has been
thoroughly co-opted by market forces, so that many studies have become little more than covert instruments for promoting
drugs. The study in which Dan died starkly illustrates the hazards of market-driven research and the inadequacy of our
current oversight system to detect them…